When Penny King told her university friends in Canterbury that she was moving to Manchester, they were horrified. “They said ‘you’ll get shot! You’ll get mugged! It’s depressing. It’s all grey and the weather’s awful’. ”
The perception that life is “grim up north” has greatly damaged the Church of England’s attempts to fill posts in the north, where some jobs for vicars, in both inner cities and rural outposts, have remained unfilled for some time.
King, a 28-year-old Church of England curate at St Elisabeth’s, Reddish, Machester, has become one of the poster girls for a CoE campaign to att

The bones of Richard III, dug up three years ago in a car park in Leicester,
will at last be laid to rest next month. The Archbishop of Canterbury will
say prayers as the coffin is lowered into a brick-lined vault beneath
Leicester Cathedral. It will be hoped that a solemn, moving occasion —
broadcast live on Channel 4 — will put an end to controversy over where and
how the last Plantagenet king should be reinterred. Yet even now, just weeks
away from the sealing of the tomb, the arrangements are still the subject of
dispute.
This time passions have been aroused not by

A Christian children’s worker who gave a colleague a Bible is claiming unfair
dismissal, saying that she was sacked from her job because of her religious
views on gay marriage.
Sarah Mbuyi alleges that a conversation she had with a lesbian colleague
ultimately led to her dismissal from Newpark Childcare in Shepherds Bush,
west London. She argued at an employment tribunal in Watford that she has
the right, under EU law, to enter into conversations with adult colleagues
subject to the normal principles of engagement in speech.
Miss Mbuyi claims that in January last year a

David Tennant’s father, a former moderator of the Church of Scotland, has revealed that he is terminally ill and has backed assisted suicide.
The Very Rev Sandy McDonald, 77, said that the term “assisted suicide” bore negative connotations for many people, but that the Church needed to back the legal provision of “assistance towards a peaceful death”. He is calling for the Church to address the issue as a matter of urgency at the annual gathering of senior Church figures in Edinburgh in May.
Last month his son, who has starred in Broadchurch and Doctor Who, dedicated a special award he receiv